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There are so many legitimate reasons why the Orange Man is Bad that it's a bit depressing that so many people feel the need to make up fake reasons too. Like, the corruption, incompetence, and blatant buffoonery aren't enough? We have to pretend Trump is a pedophile too?
I've always enjoyed hanging out in TheMotte, but the Epstein discourse is probably the best case example as to why this space matters. Epstein skepticism carries high social risks literally anywhere else.
The only thing I find mildly interesting about this whole meta crime drama is the selectively applied generosity reserved for individuals named in the "files" if they sit on the correct ideological shelf. How do you still stan for Trump, Clinton or Noam Chomsky if you actually believe they sinisterly engaged in (or at least overlooked) child rape and cannibalism? Maybe you are just genuinely disillusioned and don't want to believe your favourite leaders and intellectuals are evil but, if not child sex trafficking, what will get you to rescind your support for them?
In the spirit of "nothing ever happens", a mass societal shakeup by the world's most armed civilian underclass to punish their evil elites remains a meme.
Instead, it will be always the proles who ultimately pay for their sovereign's crimes. Now also factor in 2 decades of moral panic over video games, UK's online age verification laws, payment processors pressuring steam to delist certain games, Nexus mods removing ANY mod that touches child NPCs (completely non-sexual), Netflix's "Adolescence" driven "manosphere" hysteria, we might be looking at the most draconian assaults on ordinary people's civil liberties and digital lives since the Patriot Act.
This will be the real travesty of Epsteingate IMO.
Evil women gonna evil woman, what else is new?
This is also just the natural result of Gen X aging into the Moral Majority position. They're not digital natives, which is part of why their approach is largely Boomer 2.0. Remember that a good chunk of them came of age in the peak Pedophile Panic years, so this being one of Their Issues should probably be expected.
Liberals can likely beat them, just like the Boomers were beaten last time (and 1A code-is-speech + most Internet business located in the US + current administration unfriendly to blatant foreign attempts to assert extraterritorial sovereignty helps with this), but the technological conditions may not be as favorable this time around for the freedom side due to (among other things) long-established better alternatives and an increased amount of centralization, especially considering what apps are permitted to run on which devices. And trivial inconveniences aren't.
I can accept this form of "abuse" more than the kind of abuse evil women administer, with polite society's permission, daily. At least we can harden targets against this, but nobody would dare cross a teacher transing their kid, let alone give them the Adolescence treatment that behavior actually deserves. (Not that that series was anything other than woman-approved child pornography anyway.)
If you rescind state backing, I suspect thé teachers transing kids will find themselves having a rough go.
Not as much as you think, because transing kids is just a logical extension of what the state's actually backing, that being feminism (or to be more precise, gynosupremacy).
In fact, I'd go so far to say that 'gynosupremacy with self-identification' is technically better than the alternative for those who suffer under it, though whether the people most likely to take that opportunity deserve to benefit is another question (I think the typical term for that is "poor sportsmanship").
Telling them to pull back on the corruption there isn't going to solve the underlying cause, but it would be enough for progressive-driving-the-speed-limit-style conservatives.
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LOL. The internet was not, in fact, invented just in time for the millennials. And digital networks existed before the Internet was generally available.
Oh no, of course not. Gen X is 45-60 now; millennials are 30-45. The Internet graduated from being the domain of the specialist to general usefulness in the late '90s, so "just in time for" is still broadly accurate. At that point, Gen X was half past 35, so per Douglas Adams the Internet is still against the natural order of things for a lot of them, where for Gen Y it is not.
The Greater Eternal September came about coincident with the advent of the mobile VT-100, most commonly known as the "iPhone", but that's more a Gen Z thing. (Gen Alpha's major technological advancement is AI; they have the most to lose from Gen X caprice, as they're actively in its crosshairs.)
Actually, a good chunk of millennials aren't digital natives either, but in 30 years most of what Gen X is about to impose will likely start to lose significant ground. Most of the younger generations know "but teh pedos" is a Gen X thing anyway (outside of the conservatives among them that just copy whatever Gen X does, much like how millennials did with Boomer thought [particularly 2nd wave feminism]), or are at least in a better position to see it as bullshit as they grow up.
The midpoint of generation X didn't reach 35 until 2007.
The first commercial ISP was 1989. The original Eternal September was September 1993. And services such as AOL, Genie, Compu$erve, Fidonet, and standalone dialup BBSs were older, some much older.
These still required specialist knowledge, and specialist equipment, to actually use (AOL did try their best though). The technology became refined enough for general use in the late '90s; graduation from dial-up to dedicated always-connected hardware helped with that especially in the pre-cellphone days.
Academia was a few years ahead of that in terms of having those kinds of networks ahead of time, of course.
Not really. My decidedly not computer specialist parents (they are farmers) figured it out just fine, as did most other families I knew at the time. The tech behind dialup Internet may not have been something they fully understood, but just using it was by no means specialist knowledge.
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You're trying to convince a guy who drove a model T in his youth that he didn't grow up with cars because we've got Teslas now.
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Two minutes hate. There’s a rather large demand for content calling Trump evil. And thus any thing that can be used to make Trump look bad is popular among people who need to consume such content and share such content to prove themselves loyal to the resistance even if the reason is something that is immaterial to any other issue they care about.
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People don’t care, they want to gossip, they want a story. This ain’t some early stage republic replete with civic virtue. People have a narrative to stick to- either Trump as rightful king or Trump as evil emperor. One of the tropes of the latter has always been sexual impropriety- which in our society invariably means pedophilia(or ‘pedophilia’).
It's all so tiresome.
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Let's split the three possibilities from maximalist to minimalist.
A) Trump is a serial predator who raped kids with his buddy (as documented in some of the more ridiculously lurid accusations)
B) Trump fooled around with some of Epstein's models who may have happened to be slightly under 18
C) Trump liked hanging out with Epstein because he knew people and was wealthy
The third seems to be the most likely. Trump wasn't happy about Epstein stealing his girls (Mar-a-Lago workers like Virginia). When the Palm Beach police chief arrested Epstein, Trump called thanking him because everyone knew Epstein liked em young. Trump is an adulterer and harasser of women (reminder that he has been successfully sued, in civil court, of sexual assault) but not an out and out pedo.
That said, his links with Epstein go beyond the mere appearance of impropriety, as do those of several of his advisors. And when the files get slow-walked and redacted, it increases suspicion. And when his wife who was barely mentioned in the files and barely discussed suddenly makes a big public announcement begging everyone to STOP TALKING about her and Epstein, well.
I'd like to go into a little more detail about C. C can be broken up into C1 and C2.
C1: Trump knew that Epstein was a pedophile and was unbothered by this fact.
C2: Trump may have suspected something, but wasn't sure.
With a crime as emotionally charged as pedophilia, there's a legal aspect and a moral aspect. People aren't just interested in whether he has legal culpability. This is something that both left and right would generally expect you to stop associating with that person.
There's a middle ground theory where everyone knew he was a pedophile but neither participated nor reported him. Or facilitated him in tiny ways that technically aren't illegal so long as they can plausibly claim "they looked like adults to me."
Maybe pedophilia or ephebophilia or whatever just wasn't seen as that serious back then. (My only reference for this is a House episode where the doctors all make comments on how hot the 15 year old patient is)
Remember that you're talking about the Groupie Generation here. They're '70s people. And House is kind of peak liberal (as in, not progressive) media anyway so it's natural that people who aren't tied into knots about the fact sex exists are going to treat hangups about that as a punchline.
The gynosupremacist "every female teenager who has sex was raped" angle ramped up later, in the '80s.
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This was long after he began his political career and is therefore subject to extreme political bias. The female accuser in that case could not even remember when exactly the alleged assault was supposed to have occurred, or apparently have told anyone at the time about it, but can definitely attest that Donald Trump came and ripped her bodice off dramatically in a public shopping mall randomly on a random given day without even knowing who she was. She also had a history of exaggerated claims of rape and of writing rape fantasies in public gossip columns, and none of this was allowed to be admitted into court. But yes Trump was found liable for calling her a liar.
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There's possibility D) The Epstein saga is riddled with a plethora of falsehoods, and the actual story is much more banal than most people think.
Check this out.
Virginia is a very unreliable witness who had retracted 8 years of allegations against Alan Dershowitz. She was also accused of being a recruiter herself by Carolyn Andriano (one of the witnesses in Maxwell's trial). Ro Khanna told reporters not to ask questions or cross examine the "victim stories". But since no one from either camp gains to profit from "rehabilitating" Epstein, all the falsehoods associated with this saga are allowed to proliferate uncritically. Listen and believe. We have at least two witnesses from the Maxwell trial who, Judge Alison Nathan says, were NOT victims of illegal sexual activity, and yet received millions of dollars in compensation from the Epstein estate. And a slew of anonymous witnesses whose allegations don't appear to have been verified at all. Now we do have evidence that Epstein himself probably did have some historic engagements meeting illegal sexual activity criteria involving minors, and he wouldn't be the first or last rich socialite guilty of this. But there is no evidence that he hired minors to provide sexual services to any of his powerful friends.
What has happened is that Trump and his cronies kicked the hornet's nest for years about a predaphile elite cabal without considering second and third order consequences, in typical Trump fashion, and it came back to bite them in the arse. So now, we have an epistemologically bulletproof narrative:
American elites are a nasty cannibalistic pedo cabal rubbing hands in a dark room talking in anime-villain-speak contemplating world domination.
Epstein was a Mossad linked predaphile blackmail kingpin (allegedly puppeteering America towards Greater Israel) and the central unifying link exposing the world.
Any mention of sexual activity on Little Saint James island in the "Epstein Files" is evidence of minor sexual abuse. Absence of details means the real tapes have been scrubbed a long time ago. Exoneration means elite capture, silence is cover-up, and deviant Jews are overseeing the network.
Trump dragged everyone into his flames, but never calculated his own exit strategy.
Oh yeah. Certain corners of the Internet uncritically repeat the line that Trump is a paedophile, that he was out there on Jeff's island with Jeff raping 12 year olds (the origin seems to be the unreliable and unavailable Katie Johnson and her/their/whomever's allegations).
There was an FBI interview with a (clearly mentally unwell) male accuser in one of the batch of documents released, and all the comments were how horrible Orange Man was to rape this poor man back when he was only a boy. Now, it's always hard to tell tone on the Internet, so how much of this was genuine "I do believe he raped and drugged and the rest of it this guy along with Clarence Thomas and every other person accused here", how much was "I don't care if it's true or not, Orange Man Bad" and how much was "This story is so dumb you'd need to be a cretin to believe it, but the lulz are too good to pass up" I can't say. But there are preposterous claims floating around and depending on what side of the divide you are on, you uncritically accept that the Grues did this awful thing or the Bleens did that awful thing, because of course they did, they're awful terrible people and this is what awful terrible people do!
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You honestly can't think of an innocuous reason a woman might want people to stop linking her name with Epstein? "Oh but she was barely mentioned at all!" and yet people are passing around these comments as though they were true.
Indeed, and just look at the plethora of "eating babies" stories floating around based on ridiculously blinkered interpretations of random email fragments. I've even met people irl who believe this! There is a peculiar historical continuity to these stories about elite depravity, as though those in positions of power aren't mundane social actors and actually talk in nasty euphemisms. This is a central theme of most conspiracy theories, a projection of popular imagination riddled with Hollywood tropes about ruthlessly efficient, hyper competent villains who can bring down entire city blocks with one phone call. I think most people cannot grapple with the relative mundanity of real life, which bears little resemblance to how actual human networks operate. Conspiracy theories covert a messy, contingent, uneven and random world into something legible, which is probably more psychologically satisfying.
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I can't think of a reason why a grown woman from upper class circles (although that's always debated w.r.t. Trump) would think that begging people to stop talking about something embarrassing could ever work.
There's a lot of behavior that seems mysterious if "believing that it could ever work for accomplishing the ostensible and stated goals" were a prerequisite for engaging in it. Not just by women from upper class circles, but basically everyone in every context, even the most powerful and influential among us, like some politician or executive blaming others when they fail to get the votes or buyers. I think that people, by and large, don't care about the consequences of their actions and just follow their inner impulses in the moment.
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You can go even more maximalist than A, it just makes left-wing critics of Trump uncomfortable because it shades into Satanic panic stuff.
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Took the words out of my mouth. Like, literally, I probably typed almost those exact words back in mid-2016, before he got elected. It's been almost a full decade since, and I'm almost impressed at the resilience of people trying to keep doing this. But I guess fatigue is probably the strongest feeling I have at this point.
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